V I D E O • A G E OC T O B E R 2 0 1 1 22 With the popularity of Lionsgate’s Mad Men, the art of advertising is taking center stage once again. Whether it is to promote a product or (increasingly, a political) idea, to position it or simply sell it, advertising is now returning to a level of prominence not seen since the golden era of Madison Avenue in the mid-’1960s. Advertising also played an important role in pre-war Japan and Europe, especially to promote ideologies such as Fascism and Nazism, and in post WWII Soviet Russia to promote Communism. After the war, it was used successfully in the U.S. to promote products from former enemies: Germany, Japan and Italy. The campaign created by Helmut Krone and Julian Koening of U.S. ad agency DDB to change the perception of Volkswagen as a vehicle for the Third Reich was memorable. Three ads served the purpose: “Think Small,” “Lemon” and “Will we ever kill the bug?” All three featured just a bold headline and a picture of the VW Beetle. In the latter case, the car was shown with the tires up. Still in the ’60s, Jerry Della Femina, who was known as the “Madman” of Madison Avenue, came up with a popular spoof tagline idea for Panasonic: “From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor.” That did not prevent his agency from landing an account with Japanese car manufacturer Isuzu. In 1970 he used the tagline for his book, which eventually inspired the television series Mad Men. In the late 1980s, when BPME (now Promax) was at its zenith, it used to stage workshops where promo and ad directors explained how ad campaigns changed the future of TV shows. Among its successful outcomes was the campaign to make syndicated show Magnum PI appreciated by an elusive female audience. When changing the time slots did not work, an exasperated programmingmanager turned to his marketing executive, who devised a campaign depicting the show’s star, Tom Selleck, shirtless while kissing a woman. The ad worked and the series turned out to be a success for the local TV station. In 1992, while at Genesis Entertainment, Doug Friedman (who in 1997 became chairman of Promax) was facing the challenge of positioning for his company’s international sales people a show called Grudge Match, a juvenile but successful U.S. syndicated half-hour show in which two contestants inside a ring fought with pillows and Silly String. This was during a period when international critics were lambasting reality TV as a cultural wasteland. Taking into consideration that most international TVbuyerswere intellectuals, he chose to leverage their superiority complexes by positioning the strips as an example of the best television America had to offer, prompting acquisition execs to buy the episodes just to show viewers how bad the U.S. really was. More recent success stories come from Italy, where Luca Federico Cadura, chairman of NBC Universal Global Networks Italia, has been involved with some popular ad campaigns for both trade and consumers. “We just made a campaign with a challenging task: Propose to media planners the target of women 40-plus, delivered by our channel Diva Universal, and we found a very appealing proposition,” said Cadura. Reported Christian Murphy, senior VP, International Programming and Marketing, A+E (formerly AETN International), “We’ve been publishing for the last year or so the ‘So Much More’ campaign. We launched it at MIPCOM last year. It talked directly about what we, as broadcaster and content provider, are doing. It was a fresh new look.” He then added: “At [this] MIPCOM you’ll see our new look. We have a new font and graphics package. It’s fresh, it’s new, it’s vibrant.” But creativity can come with some risks. Recalled Cadura: “Some years ago, for Studio Universal, we were describing a special slate of movies related to food. To make it fun, the ad showed a sausage inside a film magazine box and the headline was ‘100% fat.’ We got sued by the Italian Sausage Association, which wanted to make the point that sausages weren’t that fatty.” From Canada, Lisa Wookey, VP, Marketing and Communications, at Toronto-based Entertainment One Television, related her own horror story: “In the early days of my career I was working in marketing at Viewer’s Choice and thrilled to be doing our first promotion with Disney. The promotion involved a trip for two to Toronto to see the premiere of Beauty and the Beast. The offer was advertised through a Rogers Cable bill stuffer and had been carefully vetted through Disney and myself many times over. Everyone was happy, everything had signed off. That night, I nervously attended the print run — and have been happy I did ever since. Somehow, the copy that read: ‘...win two tickets to see Disney’s hit musical’... had mysteriously morphed to: ‘...see Disney’ *hit musical,’” Wookey added: “Yes, it’s a true story.” Friedman, who’s now director of Creative Services at TV station KUSI in San Diego, California, recounted, “The most memorable result from one of my campaigns came when I got a call from Sylvester Stallone, who was in producer Joel Silver’s office and saw my Tales from the Crypt promo kit sitting on his coffee table. I put him on speaker so my staff could enjoy the great compliments he was paying us on the work, but to this day none of them believe it was really Stallone on the phone!” So, are ads primarily to position a product or strictly to induce sales? “What we sell is our positioning, so the sales message must be strictly connected to a differentiating positioning,” said Cadura. To Priscilla Pesci of Los Angeles-based Elumines, “Within the various studio and broadcast configurations, we were always focused on the bottom line — specific to converting advertising awareness into sales transactions, although that process inherently includes product positioning in order to generate effective ads.” Replied A+E’s Murphy: “A bit of both really. We build our brand through our content. It’s all really about trying to move more product. It’s hard to induce sales through marketing and advertising. It’s best to use those tools to create buzz. The sales process in programming takes a long time. Our job is to get them interested in or just aware of a program.” Results Always Come But Always At A Price T r a d e A d C a m p a i g n s (Continued on Page 24)
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